Agreed. Making a "dumb" electric car meant going against Tesla that is already making strides toward autonomy. Making a fully autonomous car meant solving new problems that could make-or-break the project.

So yeah, Apple's smart to see if they can even make an autonomous system before trying to make their own car. Make sure all the problems are solvable before trying to solve them.

Agreed. Let's pretend that Apple released a car two years from now, that in true Apple fashion is highly polished, but does not include some sort of self driving functionality while their competitors do. I doubt in that scenario that Apple's car efforts would fare well as self driving is going to change the way we think about cars.

Agreed, but do we even trust Apple to nail down autonomous software when Siri and anything cloud, mapping, or machine learning-related is always a few steps behind Google's offerings?

Yeah, because partners. But Jim Lentz of Toyota America was on Charlie Rose last week - they see self-driving cars as an initial skirmish into the larger AI market. They want the whole enchilada, not just a licensing partner.

Not only that but it positions them better. If they were to develop the defacto standard in autonomous driving systems they could then license it to anyone they want, use it in their own offering and even use the technology in other markets such as robotics.